by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith
But there was a problem.
It turned out that you couldn't just erase dreams after all. That wasn't the way it worked. Over the course of eighteen months the company started getting more and more complaints, and in the end they worked out what was going on. When you erased a dream, all you destroyed was the imagery, the visuals which had played over the dreamer's inner eye. The substance of the dream, an intangible quality which seemed impossible to isolate, remained. The more dreams a client had removed, the more of this substance was left behind: invisible, indestructible, but carrying some kind of weight. It hung around in the room where the dream had been erased, and after a hundred or so deletions the room would become uninhabitable. It was like walking into a thunderstorm of subconscious impulses – absolutely silent, but impossible to bear. After a few weeks the dreams seemed to coalesce even further, making the air so thick that it became difficult to even enter the room at all.
Unfortunately, the kind of client who could afford dream therapy was exactly the type who was turned on by litigation. After the company had paid a few huge out-of-court settlements on bedrooms which were now impassable, they turned their minds to finding a way out of the problem.
At first they tried diverting the dreams into storage data banks, instead of erasing them. This didn't work either. Some of the dream still seeped out of the hard disks, regardless of how air-tight the casing. Also, dreams take up a phenomenal amount of storage space, and the math on setting up huge server farms to handle the traffic just wasn't stacking up.
Then finally it clicked.
The problem seemed to be that the dreams weren't being used up, and so they game something else a try.
A client's receiving machine was connected to a transmitter placed near the bed of a volunteer, and two anxiety dreams were successfully diverted from the mind of one to the other. The client woke up nicely rested, ready for another hard day in the money mines. The volunteer had a shitty night of dull dreams he couldn't quite remember, but was paid for his troubles. No residue was left in the room. The dream was gone. Problem solved, and the cash started flowing again.
"And that's what you did to me last night?" I asked.
"Yes," Rabutni said. "And I think you'll be glad we did. People have varying ability to use up other people's dreams. Most can handle two a night, three at the most. They get up feeling ragged, drag themselves through the day. Usually they only work every other night – but they still make eight, nine hundred dollars a week. You, on the other hand, appear to be different."
"How's that?"
"You took four dreams last night without breaking sweat. The two you've seen, and another two – one of which was so dull I can't bear to even watch just the visuals. You could probably have taken a couple more."
"Nice to find something I'm good at."
"That's what we're all looking for, Mr. Stone. I don't know why you can do this when other people can't, but it's rare. If you sign up with us, you could make a lot of money."
"How much money?"
"We pay according to dream duration, with bonuses for unusually complex or tedious ones. Last night you pulled down over three hundred dollars' worth – and that doesn't factor in a bonus for the dullest. In an average week, depending how often you worked, you could be earning somewhere between three and five thousand dollars. While you sleep."
I coughed.
He closed the pitch. "And we pay cash. Our business is still in a slightly unstable state with regard to legality, and we find it more convenient to disguise its true nature to some of the authorities. Paying cash is good for us. And, I assume, for you."
I looked at him, biting the inside of my lower lip. Three to five thousand dollars is an awful lot of bar work.
"It's up to you," he said, shrugging and smiling that smile.
It wasn't a hard decision.
* * * * *
I signed a non-disclosure contract, and that's the way I spent the next two years. I was given a carefully anonymous-looking receiver, and had the process explained to me. Basically the deal was that I could go anywhere in the continental United States, so long as I kept the machine within six feet of my head while I slept. I didn't have to go to bed at any particular time, because the dreams booked to me were spooled into memory. When the device sensed I was in REM sleep, it fed the backlog into my head. The next morning I'd wake up and check the screen on the device to see how much I'd earned. When I slept somewhere with a console, I could connect it up to the device and my nightwork would appear on the screen like a list of email messages: how long the dreams were, when they started and finished, whether they qualified for bonus payment or were just hack work.
And at the bottom of the list, the good news.
A figure in dollars.
Rabutni had been right about my capacity, and I found I could take six or seven dreams a night without much difficulty. Some days I'd be really groggy and find it difficult to concentrate on anything more complex than smoking, but when that happened I'd just take the following night off. After six months I was recalled to REMtemps' offices and asked if I'd like to volunteer for a higher proportion of bonus dreams. I said "Hell, yes," and my earnings took another jump upwards. I set up accounts with a number of different banks, hired a street coder to write me a daemon which would keep the cash constantly on the move between them, so it was more difficult to trace, and concentrated on having fun during my waking hours.
It was a good life. I traveled all over, this time as a person with cash instead of some loser looking for a cheap bed and an easy score. After a while it came to seem natural to wear expensive clothes, to head for the uptown hotels, to wonder which Gold Card to charge things to. I got used to the less material things that money also gets you, like politeness, and respect, and a better class of bed companion.
Every now and then the IRS or some other ratfinks would close in on one particular account, but I was making enough by then that I'd just cut the money loose and set up another stash somewhere else.
There were occasional downsides. The exhaustion which came after a night full of bonuses, or following a day chain-snorting cocaine to iron out the bumps. Being forever on the move, and never having a relationship which lasted longer than a few days. There were periods when I'd go a little wobbly psychologically, and I came to realise that was because I'd spent so many nights having other people's dreams that I hadn't had time for any of my own. When that happened I'd clock off for a week or so, let my mind catch up. Those periods were like holidays, a chance to catch up with what my own subconscious had been up to, and I came to kind of look forward to them.
But the problems were few and far between, and for the most part I was having exactly the kind of life I'd always dreamed of and never really believed I'd have.
I'd found some action which was safe, which I was good at, and which paid big time money.
That should have been enough.
* * * * *
One morning I got a call from Rabutni. I was crashed out in a king-sized bed on the top floor of a hotel in New Orleans, the debris of a hard evening's pleasure spread all around me. I couldn't remember the name of the woman beside me, but she was a whiz at answering the phone. By the time I'd realized it was ringing, she already had it up out of its cradle and by her ear.
When she passed it over to me I sat up, head foggy and full of half-remembered tasks and confusions. I suppressed the urge to look at the dream receiver to see how much I'd earned. From the way I felt, I knew it was going to be considerable.
"Mr. Stone," said that voice, and I instantly became more awake. I'd only been phoned by him once before, the time they pulled me in for promotion. "Who was that who answered the phone?"
"I don't know," I said. "I mean, why? What difference?"
"I assume she's someone you've met very 'recentl
y'?"
"You could say that."
I glanced across the room to where the woman was standing. Candy, I think her name may have been. She seemed nice, and I was wondering whether she might be interested in hooking up with me for a while. At that moment she was making coffee. With no clothes on. I was hoping Rabutni would cut to the chase.
"When we're done, get rid of her. Immediately."
"What?"
"You met her last night, right? And she's in your hotel room. But she answered the phone after a single ring."
"So?"
"She may be working for someone."
I watched as she stirred just the right amount of sugar into my coffee. "Don't talk crap."
Candy winked at me and slipped into the john.
"Get rid of her," Rabutni repeated, "And then come to the office. I have a proposal for you."
The line went dead.
I got out of bed and put the device in my suitcase. The readout said I'd earned over fifteen hundred dollars during the night, a new personal best. Then I got dressed, and when Candy came back out, spruced and fresh and ready to play, I said I had to go out for a while. She took it badly, and then well, and then badly again. She tried a lot of things to get me to stay. When it was clear that wasn't working, she said she'd hang out in the room and wait for me. For however long it took.
Call me someone with low self-esteem, but women don't usually behave that way after a single night in my company. It wasn't proof, but it was enough to make me gather my things and walk out the door, leaving her shouting at my back. In the elevator I did what I'd been told to do in such circumstances, and pressed a button on the side of the dream receiver.
There was a soft "crump" sound from within and the readout panel went black. The unit was now dead, logic board fused into inexplicability. If the cops or anyone else pulled me over, there was no way of telling what the machine had ever been capable of. No way of proving it in a court of law, anyhow.
On the plane to Jacksonville it occurred to me to wonder why – if Candy had been some kind of government agent – she hadn't simply done whatever she needed to do while I was sleeping. If there was one thing a REMtemp was guaranteed to do most nights, it was catch some zeds. Maybe she'd needed to talk to me, get names or something.
I couldn't work out what had been going on – if anything – and it didn't make much difference. I had to go back to the office anyway, to pick up a replacement receiver. I caught some breakfast before heading for REMtemps, slumped over a table in an upmarket diner. I wondered how many bonus dreams I must have had to earn fifteen hundred bucks, but couldn't get my mind to function well enough to figure it out. It had to be a lot. Usually the fog faded to a soft confusion after a couple hours, but this morning it felt like I'd never slept in my whole life. I didn't want to meet with Rabutni until I felt together enough to cope.
A gallon of coffee and half a pack of cigarettes wired me to the point where I was ready to face him, and I left the diner and staggered into the big black building. The smile I got from the REMtemps receptionist remained patronizing rather than respectful, but that's receptionists for you. I guess they'd probably look down their noses at the President if he happened by.
This time we didn't meet in a side office, but in Rabutni's own den. It was no bigger than your average football pitch, but luckily we sat at the same end so we didn't have to shout.
I told him I'd done what he told me, and he smiled. I added that I'd fritzed the machine, also as per instructions, and that I'd need another one. He smiled again. Then he pitched it to me.
He said he was pleased – very pleased – with the work I'd been doing. Yowsa, was he satisfied. He did everything short of offering me a cigar. Though I hadn't known it, he said, a number of the company's most important clients now asked for me, apparently because I dreamed their dreams better than anyone else. Some REMtemps left little vestiges behind, evidently, elements very personal to the original dreamer which, they couldn't assimilate. I got the whole lot, every little shadow and whisper and scrap. Hence the bonuses.
Hence also the fact that he wanted to offer me a chance at a different – and more lucrative – line of work.
Memories.
As soon as he said the word I started shaking my head. Dreams were one thing. Though not exactly legal, they weren't a big deal. Kind of like smoking dope: every now and the cops target someone to make up a quota or in the hope it'll be a gateway to something more juicy, but most of the time they turned a blind eye. Probably ten percent of the Upper House was using REMtemps' services anyway. And smoking dope, for all I knew.
Memories were different. Though it had been known for a couple of years that they could be externalized in the same way as dreams, doing so was absolutely and completely illegal. Divesting people of their memories was very bad news for the authorities. For a start, it meant that polygraphs – admissible as evidence for ten years – didn't work. If a suspect genuinely had no memory of committing a crime, fooling the polygraph was a breeze. In a way, it wasn't even deception. As far as the guy was concerned, the incident had just never happened.
Plus this:
People are their memories. Pure and simple. What's happened to you is what you are. If you start taking bits of that away, you become a different person. If you remove the childhood incidents – however dire or quotidian, terrible or trivial – where someone learnt right from wrong, you end up with a guy who's kind of difficult to deal with. He doesn't have second thoughts about anything any more. He just doesn't care. Such people don't understand why they shouldn't steal, or rape, or murder – and that makes them better at it. In the event they do get caught, another memory dump just before the polygraph will blank that line of evidence straight away. This is not good for the courts. It's not good for society in general, as a matter of fact.
A test case eighteen months before had settled the issue. A freelance proxy dreamer who'd agreed to carry a criminal's memory of a certain incident, thus derailing what would otherwise likely have been a successful prosecution, was sentenced to two life terms in prison – exactly half what the real culprit would have received, had he been convicted.
In other words, memories weren't a trade you wanted to get involved in. I said as much to Rabutni.
He heard me out, and when I'd ground to a halt, he let a silence settle. When it had gone on long enough that it seemed like what I'd said had been to another person on some other day, he began.
"Yes," he said. "Memory temping is illegal – and rightly so. If it was legal the criminal justice system would fall apart, and none of us want that."
"Good," I said. "That's settled then. Where do I pick up my new receiver?"
"However," Rabutni continued, as if I'd said nothing at all, "The kind of memories I'm referring to do not relate to criminal activities. I'm talking about little things, and only temporary transferals."
"If they're that trivial, let the clients deal with them," I suggested. "And if they're only getting rid of the memory temporarily, tell them to take a valium instead. Or go out and get steaming drunk."
"And miss out on a chance for us to make more money?" Rabutni asked, eyes ironically wide. "I'm not just talking about the company either, Mr. Stone. This new service is going to pay its employees very well."
"The answer's still no."
He kept looking at me, hands folded over one another on the desk in front of him. "Exceedingly well."
"Nope, and no thank you. Also, no."
"Ten thousand dollars a memory," he said.
I stopped speaking before my mouth had even framed the next word.
He kept talking. "And the memory can be a single instant, an individual fact. When the client base is built up you could earn a quarter million dollars every two months. All for holding memory fragments for no more
than a week."
He let that sink in for a while, and I thought about it. About pulling in seven figures a year. Wealth has a way of operating on a sliding scale. When you've bought all the things you can at your current level, you start noticing the things you still can't have. And you start wanting those too. Or looked at another way: a couple more years' work, and I'd never have to lift a synapse again. I could retire, fuck off down to Mexico and just do what the hell I liked for the rest of my days.
"No," I said. I knew where I was, and I was doing okay. Dreams were do-able. They faded. Though I'd never tried one, I suspected that memories didn't – even if they were only supposed to be temporary.
"I think you'll find the answer's 'yes'," Rabutni said, "When you ask me again where you pick up your new receiver."
My mind was still dulled from the night's work, and I didn't get what he was driving at. "Where do I pick it up?"
"Unless you accept my offer, you don't," he said. "You take memory work, or you're fired."
"You're a fucker, aren't you," I said.
His smile didn't waver, and I realized it wasn't a smile and never had been. "I have heard that opinion expressed, yes."
I looked out the window, more to keep him waiting than any other reason. I wondered about Candy, whether she'd been paid by Rabutni. He would have known that I'd just woken when he called, and that I'd be unable to judge properly after a night full of heavy bonus dreams. Maybe he'd even set it up that way. Didn't make much difference in the end. He had me by the balls, and he knew it. Without dreamwork I was back on the streets, an environment in which I'd never thrived. I had money squirreled away, sure, but not enough. Too much of it had been pissed away.
With the memory work I could buy my own bar, if it came to it.
"Okay," I said.
* * * * *